


Realizations

by pirategirljack



Category: Stitchers (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, post-season
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 05:41:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4552776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirategirljack/pseuds/pirategirljack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirsten deals with what she learned in Cameron's head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Realizations

**Author's Note:**

> This came out kind of long, but hey.

It took far, far too long for the flat line to start spiking with a heartbeat again, and Cameron came back to life so suddenly that he sat up on the table. Kirsten was plastered against his back before he could fall back down, her arms around his shoulders and her face buried in his neck. She was sobbing, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried so hard, but it was like her emotions were a separate thing from her. She could no more tame them than she could tame a stampede of wildebeests. 

She she didn’t even try. It was like being in the stitch, all the emotions flooding around her and flowing through her. Maybe that’s why she had to be in a tank of water when she did it, so her body was already ready for a sea.

Cameron wasn’t conscious, not really, and after a few painful-sounding breaths, he collapsed against her and went limp again. Tim rushed forward to get him from the cassette to the stretcher, Ayo went to work getting him stabilized, but all Kirsten cared about was that steady beating on the lifeline reading, her hand on his shoulder, the steady rise and fall of his chest. 

She’d known he had something that was making him delicate, and when she saw the scar on his chest, she’d guessed most of it. She’d also known that he wasn’t delicate, that he was tough and strong and vital--but he didn’t think he was. That he would do this, that he would risk that precious heart, believing that it was fragile and he was breakable--and then that he’d be thinking of her so fiercely when he willingly died so that she would see it like that, feel it like that--

Kirsten had never believed that his heart was so breakable, but now she thought hers might be, and it was terrifying.

They pulled him away and wouldn’t let anyone else into the room for a while, and since she was soaking wet and chilled to the bone by a combination of revelations, shock, fear, and plain old fashioned air conditioning, she went to the locker room to have something other than staring at a closed door and an unconscious Cameron to do. She stripped down, turned on the shower...and then couldn’t think of what to do, there was so much in her head, so she sat with her knees pulled up to her chest under the warm spray and just sort of stayed there. She was done crying--but she couldn’t seem to remember how to function, and that was just another scary new detail in a day that was really starting to freak her out.

Camille came into the little locker room. “Kirsten? You’ve been in here a long time. Are you okay?” She came around the corner and saw Kirsten in the water, and switched into mother-mode. She turned off the water, got a towel, and wrapped Kirsten up in it like it was a blanket, then sat down on the wet tiles herself to clamp an arm around her room-mate’s shoulders.

“For someone who is so determined to never have a standard relationship, you’ve got an incredible nurturing instinct,” Kirsten said, shivering again. It must’ve been an actual long time, not an exaggeration; the water had gotten cold and undone all the good having it warm did.

Camille laughed, and squeezed her tighter. “He’ll be okay, you know. He’s strong.”

“I know.” And then, at Camille’s skeptical face, she repeated, a little surer and a little more like her usual self, “I know. He thinks he’s not, but he is.”

“Then why are you curled up here like a damsel in distress?”

“There’s too much--” she waved her hand around her head, then again around her chest. “I don’t know what to do with it. All these feelings.”

“You care about him. A lot. It’s normal to be worried.”

Kirsten made an annoyed noise and went to find some clothes. She kept a spare set in her locker, but she rarely actually needed them. The clothes she’d worn today, though, were somewhere in the lab and she wasn’t about to walk out naked to get them. “There’s that. But there’s more than that. The stitch--”

She stopped. 

And Camille didn’t. She wasn’t sure if she was grateful for that or not. “What about the stitch?” Then, when Kirsten didn’t answer, “K, you can tell me. We need to know, anyway, and since Cameron isn’t here to ask, it’s up to me.”

“I didn’t find anything useful.”

“But something you did find is throwing you for a loop.”

“It’s--I don’t--”

“It can help to make sense of things if you try to put them in words.”

Kirsten quirked an eyebrow at her friend. “You’ve been reading the psych books again.”

Camille shrugged it off. “I thought it might be useful since everyone keeps telling me things anyway. Like you. You’re going to tell me what happened.”

Kirsten pulled her clothes on, and Camille waited. When she was done, she plunked down on the bench and sighed, and decided to just say it. “Cameron is in love with me.”

“What?”

“I felt it. Saw it. Every good memory we had all at once, from his point of view. And I think I’m in love with him.”

“Woah, what??”

“I knew. I mean, I knew there was something--different--there. I didn’t know what it meant, what I was feeling. It wasn’t the same as what I felt for Liam. And that wasn’t...enough. Not for getting married. Not for something that big. But when I told him I needed to know myself before I committed to something like that, I wasn’t just making excuses, and now that I’m here, with this, it’s still true.”

Camille’s eyes were big, and she looked like she was looking for something to say before she settled on, “That’s big.”

Kirsten looked at her hands. “There’s more.”

“More.”

“We met before the accident. When I was a kid. We were in the hospital at the same time and we met, and he told me everything would be okay. I didn’t remember that. I don’t think he did either. It was his last thought.” Her voice cracked, and she took a moment to master it, to clear her throat. “He wasn’t dead, not really. He wanted me to see it. And I think--when this all started, I didn’t trust any of it, or anyone involved with the program--but I trusted him. I didn’t trust the impulse, but I did feel like he wouldn’t hurt me, and he’s been there the whole time helping me get through all this...all this strangeness…”

“Because he always was.”

“But what if--what if that memory wasn’t real? I don’t know it, and we’d just seen a video of me as a kid earlier today. What if he was delirious? What if it’s all residual emotion and it evaporates and he still loves me, but I just--don’t? But know what I lost?” Her voice was getting shaky again, but she pushed on anyway. “What if he doesn’t wake up? What if I spend the rest of my life knowing this--and he’s not there? What if I did to him what I did to my mom?” And then her voice was gone and she clamped a hand over her mouth to smother a new round of tears.

“What did you do to your mom? Kirsten? What happened?”

“That video, Camille. The one Ed hid. It was of me--after the accident. And my mom. She was in a coma. I wasn’t--I wasn’t like this yet. Dad--dad had me hooked up to the very basic stitcher technology, and I was supposed to bring mom back, but--but it didn’t work. She died. I broke myself. Oh, god, Camille, what if I broke Cameron, too?”

Camille didn’t try to smooth that way with words, and this time Kirsten was sure she was grateful. She just wrapped both her arms around Kirsten’s shoulders and squeezed her so hard she could hardly breathe, and it was exactly what she needed. After a while, she opened her mouth to say something, but Maggie came in and whatever Camille had been about to say, it never got said.

“Cameron’s stabilised. We can go see him now.”

\---

He was so pale. Kirsten didn’t want to see him like this, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave. He was already in a hospital bed once today, and she’d gone to see him there, and squeezed his hand. She couldn’t avoid seeing him now, when he needed her more.

Linus was red-eyed and had one hand wrapped around Cameron’s arm, and the other around Camille’s waist the second she had changed and joined them. 

Maggie was frowning, her arms crossed and her stance combative. She kept herself by the door, and for the first time, Kirsten wondered if her hardness was to cover for some secret softness. She’d had a son, and he didn’t talk to her. Maybe they were her new kids. Maybe she was thinking about Fisher in a bed like this somewhere else.

Ayo looked exhausted, and Tim had an arm around her shoulders, Alex holding her hand. 

Everyone wanted him to be okay. And as soon as she crept into the room, everyone else started creeping out.

Camille patted her shoulder on her way past, and soon she was all alone in the dim lab. The same one Camille had had to climb through all those tunnels to get into so they wouldn’t die of the virus. How ridiculous would it have been to survive that, only to die like this, poisoned by his own choice in a desperate bid for information he didn’t have and she couldn’t find.

“Wake up, Cameron.”

Nothing. Not even a twitch. 

“I know you’re in there. I know you’re not gone. Just wake up. Please?”

She laid her hand on his, squeezed his fingers--and felt the familiar sliding-swoop feeling of dropping into a stitch. But there were no machines here, no currents pouring through her brain, this was just him and her in a room, holding hands.

And yet, there she was. Back in the memory of their first mission, when she’d kissed him. She didn’t remember that before, but the memory was so clear.

“Cameron?”

His voice came from somewhere else, outside the memory, like it did when he was monitoring a normal stitch. “What’s up, Stretch?”

She almost passed out, she was so relieved. “You’re still here.”

“‘Course I am. Where else would I be but behind my station when you’re getting your brain scrambled for science?”

“But you aren’t.”

“What? You’re talking nonsense, kid.”

He didn’t know. The memory looped around again.

“What do you see?” he asked. Like it was any other stitch.

“You. And me. Our first mission.”

He was quiet for a few breaths. The memory shifted. She’d just smiled at him on her porch, and he was handing her a crystal. “Now?”

She felt what he was feeling, and there was time to pay attention to the details of it now. “You’re handing me your heart.”

“Do you still have it?”

“Of course I do.”

“I was worried.” She looked around, trying to see if he was lurking somewhere in his own mind, hiding, but she only saw the memory him.

It was the other time on the porch, when she’d thanked him for not being a nobody. And she had an idea. Kirsten stepped over to where the memory of herself stood, and lined herself up with it--and took it’s place. The memory of Cameron was supposed to smile and turn away, but this time when he leaned in, he stayed. He reached a hand up like he was going to touch her cheek, but he stopped himself and folded his fingers away.

“I didn’t want this to be what you saw.”

“These were your last thoughts.”

“But they weren’t the purpose. You know that, right?”

“Cameron, I never thought they were. You’re not that...callous. Or that manipulative. We had a mission and you were doing your best to do it.”

She wanted to touch him, but when she reached for his hand, they were in the street in front of the restaurant. “I didn’t see the plates. It was all for nothing.”

“Not nothing.” And this time she did catch his hand. All the memories faded away, replaced by a warm golden glow she could feel in every fiber of her body. “Come home, Cameron. I can’t do this without you.”

He smiled at her--

\--and she was looking at his actual face, in the actual world, and they were still holding hands. He smiled here, too, and it was sad and scared and looked more exhausted than anyone had ever looked, but his eyes were clear.

“Holy mother of chest pains. I feel like I died.”

“You kind of did. Don’t scare me like that again.”

And then his smile wavered. “What just happened?”

“I don’t know--it was like a stitch, but we did it together, without any help. And--” She moved her hand, then took his fingers in hers again. Testing. Confirmed. “And it’s still there.”

“Because I wasn’t really dead, maybe. I was still a little conscious.”

“I’m just glad you’re back. I was--I was so afraid.” She sat down suddenly so that she wouldn’t fall down, all the fear and exhaustion hitting her at once, but she kept hold of his hand, so that her chin landed on the edge of the bed near where she was holding onto him for deal life. “I never want to be that afraid again.”

The sadness in his face almost broke her heart. He pulled his hand from hers and smoothed her hair back from her face. “I can’t promise that, in this job, but I’ll do my best.”

“Can I--can I just stay here for a while? And listen to your heart?”

“Get up here,” he said, and held his arms out to her. She climbed onto the narrow bed beside him and arranged herself so she could hear his heart beating and not hinder it with her weight. He gramaced a few times, and she saw bruises and red marks from all the attempts to save him, but he wouldn’t let her change her mind. When they were settled, he held her the way he always had when something happened, when he’d saved her from bullets and speeding cars. Emotional protection was no different.

“I’m so glad you’re back.”

“I’m glad you brought me back.”

“I wish I could have done the same for my mom.”

“That can’t be helped now. But maybe knowing about that is what made this work.” He tightened his grip a little, and pushed his face against her hair in something that was not quite a kiss, but carried the same connotations.

“Will this stay? Feeling like this?”

“I hope so.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then I’ll just have to woo you the old fashioned way, because whatever else this adventure has taught me, Cupcake, it’s taught me exactly how much you mean to me.”

She looked up at that, and their faces were very close together. He smiled, lopsided and a little shy, and she decided to take a chance, so she pushed forward just enough to touch her lips to his. 

It wasn’t like that memory kiss where she didn’t know what she was doing and he didn’t know how to react. This was real. And it was exactly what they both wanted.


End file.
